Cannot Enter Soul Cairn, Serana on Dialogue Loop, Character frozen in place.

[Sirotnak]

Some small spoilers ahead---

 

Ok so I just got into Valerica's lab, gathered all the ingredients, talked to Serana, we went over to the bowl, put the s#*! in the bowl. Then she got to the point where she offered to soul trap or vamp turn me. I picked soul trap. So when Serana goes to cast the spell on me, it takes 5 minutes for the next quest stage to progress meanwhile I'm frozen in place waiting, then it finally says enter the soul cairn and I can move again. But it won't let me enter the soul cairn, even though the portal is open and I got soul trapped, it just drains my health like before. To make it worse, if you activate Serana again, she is stuck on a dialogue loop of "I promise to make this as painless as possible" blah blah blah, over and over and over. To make it even worse, my character is once against completely frozen while you wait for her to recast the spell, which of course never happens, since she already did.

 

OK so those are my problems. And I have not found a single thing like it anywhere on the internet. I have 144 mods loaded, not sure which one is to blame for this. I have many of the popular SSE mods, I got rid of many of the script heavy mods. I do have Amazing Follower Tweaks loaded, but Serana is my only follower besides my Sophia and Inigo mod followers. I need help. I've restarted my play through 6 times, 5 of those times I had a clean game all the way until I fought alduin, and then had to restart for one mod related reason or another. I finally sought out a good load order and finally hoped I had cured all issues, and restarted the game one more time. Everything has been good besides a few delays and easy manual fixes for big scripts to load (i.e. Kynesgrove Dragon resurrection, Alduin final battle, Returning to Tamriel from Sovengard, etc.) The game only crashed once from an issue with the Royal Armory Mod, which I fixed by disabling the mod (unfortunate, since I really liked that mod). This is the first time I have even attempted to do the DLC while loading mods, and this is quite depressing. Any help for what the culprit might be would be greatly appreciated.

Edited December 31, 2017 by Sirotnak

[Sirotnak]

I figured it out on my own. Serana must be directly next to the bowl otherwise, this s#*! happens. So push her or hit her a few times until she moves into place. I will leave this post up for those who may one day run I to my problem. Unlikely as it may be.